


Shining Lights

by GRAYXOF



Category: Metal Gear
Genre: Depeche Mode - Freeform, Gen, MOLOTOK-68, Operation INTRUDE N313, TX-55, outer heaven
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-12-09
Updated: 2016-12-09
Packaged: 2018-09-07 11:28:49
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,100
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8799160
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/GRAYXOF/pseuds/GRAYXOF
Summary: METAL GEAR/MSX2 BOSS FIGHT #10: SNIPER "QUIET"





	

**Author's Note:**

  * For [spaerle](https://archiveofourown.org/users/spaerle/gifts).



> SUPPLY DROP #213: _Quiet survives Mission 45 and joins Venom in Outer Heaven. Solid Snake comes face to face with her._

“ _Access level H104 confirmed. Enter.”_

The key card nearly snaps in Solid Snake’s fingers as he pulls it from the lock, brittle plastic slick with blood and chlorinated water and God only knows what else. He slinks around and through the heavy door to the hangar, keeps one eye closed in case his entrance trips an automatic floodlight, but the dim fluorescents of the hallway give way only to pitch dark. It's all void, apart from a sliver of light that narrows to nothing as he eases the door shut behind him. The black is stale with recycled air and artificial coolant that isn’t nearly enough to take the edge off the heat roiling up from the core of the world. A hundred floors underground, Outer Heaven feels more like Hell.

Snake presses his back to the wall as soon as he’s locked in, sinks to the floor before he can really think about it. He shoves the key card back into his kit along with the rest of the cards, cassette tapes, and packets of noctocyanin he’s picked up on the way down, pops a pill because he’s been awake going on twenty-six hours now. Pinpricks of red and green pierce the darkness, constellations that map out machinery, circuit boards.

Security cameras.

Snake’s head knocks hard against the wall, eyes rolling back as he allows himself a second of sheer exhaustion. Radio reception is patchy this far underground, but he can hear an echo of Master Miller’s best, most condescending _Hellmaster_ voice in his ear all the same. _C’mon, rookie, keep your eyes open. It’s quiet now and you know that doesn’t mean shit. How many times do I-_ Fuck. Snake feels like the goddamn rookie he is, stripped raw,in over his head. The procedural shit, the combat, that’s all fine, standard even. Every minute of FOXHOUND, every drill, every lesson, all of it was for–

_The boss of Outer Heaven is the commander of FOXHOUND. Big Boss._

_–_ for what? Big Boss holds up the world with his left hand and tears it down with his right, so which hand is it that pulls the trigger when Solid Snake fires his gun? The men and women Snake’s killed in Outer Heaven have all been studded with diamonds. Shining lights sewn into the patches on their sleeves, bright in their eyes. Not one of them afraid to die at his hand. After all, Big Boss sent–

_Everything is done by him._

Snake can feel the truth coiling in his animal gut even as his human brain fights to rationalize the situation. The noctocyanin is keeping him alert, yeah, but it’s screwing with his perception, heightened awareness settling to paranoia without a point of focus. He needs rest, badly, but at this rate rest is going to get him killed. His eyes have adjusted by now, can just barely make out the massive form of the TX-55 in the darkness. Everything is shadow on shadow. Snake tugs off his gloves with his teeth and starts on arming the C4 he’s been carrying all day, molding the plastic into fist-sized blocks and fitting each one with a detonator. He’s halfway through the fourth charge when the bass drops.

The music hits him like a physical blow and the floor _lights up,_ a shockwave of blinding white spreading out from the far end of the hangar. Snake dives on instinct, braces himself for the electrical surge he’s learned to expect from the floors in Outer Heaven. It doesn’t come. The panels under him are bright, warm to touch, but otherwise inert–

–and he’s right in the center of a space so vast, he can’t see the ceiling.The TX-55– _Metal Gear–_ is at least fifty feet tall and it’s nowhere close to taking up even half the hangar. It’s also the only real cover but Snake isn’t moving a fucking _muscle_ because–

 

_–I hope he never lets me down again–_

 

–he’s staring down the barrel of a sniper rifle. He doesn’t recognize the make, and that's what surprises him– it’s brutal, black and gold, cocked easily in the arm of a woman in a battered overcoat and little else. Her hair is dark, tied back, her mouth covered by some kind of fucked up nylon muzzle _._ Like she’s Big Boss' goddamn  _attack dog_. Snake grimaces, takes in the curve of her hips, her bare skin, the scarring on her ribs and down her neck as much as her gun and the bandolier of ammo looped across her chest, the knife on her belt, the radio collar and, yes, the diamond glinting on her armband, like a beacon. Her boots are worn, encrusted with red sand. Whatever she does for Outer Heaven, it keeps her on the surface– _or_ , Snake thinks bleakly, _farther below_.

Her gaze is level, piercing, as cold and as empty as a moonlit desert, cuts him to the core and Snake shivers, feels more naked than she is. 

She jerks the rifle up, the universal sign for _on your feet_ so Snake does as he’s told, keeps his hands in the air, his breathing slow. Panic claws at his throat, his lungs, the tendons in his fingers for want of a gun. His life doesn’t matter, never has, but the mission– the mission isn’t overyet, so this can’t be the end of the line– but her expression says otherwise. He'd rather fight the TX-55. 

 

_Never want to come down,_

_Never want to–_

 

Her finger twitches on the trigger in time to the synth.

“What do they call you?” is what he asks. Of all the questions throbbing in the back of his skull, this isn’t one he really needs answered– still, he expects a response. What he gets is the deafening silence when she throws a signal with her free hand and Depeche Mode cuts out.

Without a rhythm to temper it, time slows down, fractured into still frames of action, reaction. In, out. _Breathe._ Snake grapples the barrel of her rifle–she fires and the shot cuts through his sneaking suit like it’s nothing, grazes his inner thigh, sends a spray of dark blood over the tiles. The metal sears his bare hands but the bullet’s in the floor, punched out one of the lights. He levels all his weight into twisting the gun out of her hand but he’s only done this with sidearms and semi-auto rifles, nothing as big as this so his balance is off and she’s _strong_ , and before he can blink he’s on his back and she’s gone in a howl of empty air. Somewhere far above him, the bolt of her rifle slides into place.

When the music cranks back up, it’s a song he doesn’t know.

 

**°**

 

_“The kid’s pretty good.”_

Quiet settles back on her heels. She's balanced on one of the steel support beams that cross the hangar, watching through her scope as Solid Snake– _David,_ Venom had called him– slips into the shadow of the TX-55. V’s voice is heavy in her ear. She grunts in response, carefully noncommittal.

_“I know, but you can’t kill him.”_

Her grip on the Molotok tightens, sends the green thread of the laser sight skittering over the tiles. It would be easy, _so_ easy, to just–

_“Quiet.“_

Ten years, and the way he says her name hasn’t changed.

_“You have to let him go.”_

Ten years, and she can count the times she’s disobeyed a direct order from him on one hand. Because she’d spotted a CFA patrol he’d missed, from a higher vantage point with her freak perfect vision, because they'd had a _slight_ difference of opinion on the best way to take out a Rooivalk (and when she got ripped in half by a strafing run, he never once said _I told you so_ ), because like hell she was gonna let him walk into a valley flanked by sniper SKULLS alone. Ten years of fighting back to back, of playing vanguard, bodyguard, red right hand, _gun_ to Venom Snake, half the living (or dead?) legend Big Boss, and it’s only now at the end of it all that the messy implications of working for a _body double_ are starting to sink in.

Ten years since she’s thought of him as just that, the phantom, the reflection in the mirror. It’s always been easy to push the truth away, to the back of her mind, to forget that the man she's signed her death over to wasn’t real. _Isn’t_ real. V is a shadow, and now that the lights are coming on one by one–

 

[ N312 ] _Command will send Gray Fox. He’s FOXHOUND’s top agent, kind of a legend, ex XOF. Miller and Campbell love him. What they don’t know_ will _hurt them, this time around: Fox has been with you and me since San Hieronymo. He’ll relay the appropriate intel back to HQ. A word of advice, my friend: stay out of his way. Fox doesn’t know how to play nice._

 

[ N313 ] _The operation has been expanded and revised. Operative Solid Snake will follow Fox’s route. It’s imperative they make contact. I’ll hand Solid off to you at the checkpoint after that– the frequency will be 120.13. You know what to do._

 

[ ███ ] _Make it look real._

 

–all that’s left is to hit _play_ on a life that’s been paused since that helicopter exploded over the Caribbean in 1975.

 _“Stand down,”_ V says, softly, with just enough edge to remind her who’s calling the shots here, even though she's always technically been outside the chain of command, even though she only works for their one-up by proxy.  _“You can still walk away from this. The autodestruct sequence will engage after he blows the TX. It’s a three-thousand second countdown, you can,“_ and no, _no,_ his voice is breaking, cracked where it’s been scored by years of pressure and pain, because they both know she’s not going anywhere. _"It's okay."_ He sighs, falls silent, but his breathing is staggered and rough and Quiet knows, she _knows_ the way his hands shake when he’s like this, how his eye goes blank and far away like static on the radio, so she starts humming.

Once, all she had to do to save him was walk away, and if the solution now was so clear-cut she’d be long gone– but that won’t work, not this time. She has photosynthetic skin, bones like iron, all kinds of medically questionable bullshit going on that may see her survive a nuclear bombardment, but what good is that if she can’t _protect_ –

There's a part of her– and it's stronger, darker, burns hotter than the other part– that knows this is the way things need to go. Outer Heaven isn't a nation or a cause, it's dying on your feet for what you–

 

~~_he's the two of us, together_ ~~

 

There's a difference, maybe, between surviving and really  _living._

She has her rifle, a special requisition from the Diamond Dogs days, from when their home was a bastion built with their own hands, pink and silver steel in the ocean at dawn and not a wound carved deep in the heart of the world, but she may as well be holding a shitty tranq weapon because taking out Soli– _David–_ won’t save any of them. They’re all going to hell, it’s just a matter of method– and she’s not going to spend the time they have left arguing semantics.  

So: when Quiet pulls the trigger, the bullet hits the ceramic plate over the TX-55’s shin, cuts through the flesh and titanum underneath, _just_ close enough to where David’s working on his C4 to look like a near miss. A torrent of artificial blood– a chemical cocktail of lubricant and electrolytic conductor–erupts from the wound. It looks bad but it won’t harm him, or the plastic explosives.

 

_Make it look real._

 

Quiet is still humming as she reloads, fires, not paying attention to the way David darts in and out of cover, nor to the crash when the TX-55 buckles and collapses into the far wall, destabilized by her shot. What matters to her is that on the other end of their frequency, V’s breathing is steady now. Calm.

And, what the hell: she gets a final shot in, right before David blows the C4 and the countdown starts. He’s already at the exit, flickering through a burning wall of smoke and mirrors, gone in a heartbeat. It would be nothing, to follow him through the fire.

She gives him ten minutes.

 

**°**

 

OBTAINED TAPE: [NEVER LET ME DOWN AGAIN]

 

 


End file.
